[The installation this week of the decidedly low-tech "new" stack]

Very few of them came with directions. The couple manuals that did come with them. turned out to be written in French. Even after translating them, they weren’t very helpful. But that’s sugaring. Part of the fun is the fiddling with the equipment to make it all work together efficiently, causing all sorts of opportunities for arguments and mayhem.

It kept us in the shack more than we should have been and spending less time out in the woods. I’m looking forward to this coming boiling season to get out into the sugarbush a little more often, checking lines and spending less time with wrenches and duct tape.

This past week we had a couple warm days, including a beautiful 40-degree run overnight with mist and rain that must have had the sugar maple trees ready to pop with sap. We and most others were caught out unready to tap (still are), and now it’s cold again. I’m betting on this coming weekend, after Valentine’s Day to tap out. We should be ready by then, even though we still have lots of line work to do.

As far as new technologies we’re introducing in 2009, we have a short list. We’ll have steam hoods this year, which isn’t that big a deal. They came with the used evaporator we bought. This directs the steam out the ports in the roof. We may also introduce automatic draw-off, which is a clever device that senses the temperature of the fluid in the sugar pan and opens up a valve only when it reaches the boiling temperature of maple syrup. This will free up an extra hand in the sugar house, although it does involve a lot of fiddly settings and is yet another thing that could go awry. I broached the topic with the guys, and they all furrowed their brows.

Other than that, our priority has been redoing many of the older lines we use, so that we can get much more sap this year to feed the larger evaporator. We completely re-did our bush in Strafford, expanding it to about 1050 taps, and just this past week started running line to an additional 200 trees here in Thetford, making for a combined total of about 1,600. With good vacuum and a good sap year, this might provide as much as 700 gallons of maple syrup, doubling or tripling our production from last year.

[Burning: cherry. Stack temperature: 750 F. Sound: like a jet]

I took a flashlight to the interface between the stack and the roof, and sure enough, I could see a blue smolder smoke seeping out from where the old shingles touched the wood, now hot with eight hours of boiling. A good bit of mayhem ensued right then. The three or four of us ran about using sap, water, a fire extinguisher, snow and everything else that came to hand to cool both that smoldering area and the stack. We opened the evaporator doors to draw the heat out and threw a piece of plywood over the pans so that nothing would drop in as we were attacking the roof.

Long story short, the sugar shack stood, and I had a long night with a lot of unboiled sap to contemplate what went wrong, and how we’d attack the problem the next morning.

What went wrong was that we’d become much more efficient. The same rig never came close to this heat the prior year, but then we’d added a blower, a homemade preheater and a woodshed that provided drier wood. All of those factors significantly increased the heat under the pans, and also through the stack. We were very, very lucky. My policeman friend Wayne, who grew up just down the road, told me the story of when he’d managed to create the same problem decades ago in his grandfather’s old operation. Pretty much the same cause: homemade roof jack without the right clearance between the hot surface and the combustible roof materials. Without any room for error, any subtle changes, such as the species of wood used to fire the evaporator, can put the temperature at the wood above the point of combustion.

Which brings us to the “new” used rig we just installed in the sugar shack that we’ve come to call affectionately “the monster.” It has a stack that is 16 inches wide, and we intend to throw through that the fires of heck. I asked Robert, who’s been dragooned again into helping with the carpentry, just how far away should wood be from a stuck that has running through it the fires of heck. He said, oh, about 18 inches. Lots of brows furrowed in that cold off-season sugar shack that morning. But Robert had a plan. He was going to box the stack in right from the metal of the roof, cutting away large sections of old shingles and roof boards, adding a cement board set of curtains, following the stack down to the evaporator.

Working up in that roof area above the evaporator is one of the prettiest things about sugaring, and that’s saying a lot. The way the cold hard sun penetrates spaces between the dried out wood of the monitor flaps creates a sliver of light, like a sheet that lights up anything in that very, very narrow layer of space. In sugar season, you see an amazing cross section of steam, whirling and dancing, much like cream does when just added to black coffee in a glass mug. This day we witnessed sawdust dance in a nimbus coming down through the empty hole left from the old stack, as we cut around it creating a properly-sized hole for The Monster. I whipped put my phone to take this pretty low-quality shot when I saw it. Beautiful stuff happens whenever we play with that space.

Robert and Mike carefully cut out a square that was a couple three feet to a side, removing only the wood and shingle and leaving the standing seam roof on top untouched. It was an impressive act of carpenter surgery, and a big sign of how much larger our operation will be this coming sap season. When you can actually fit yourself through your stack, you’re going to make some maple syrup. That, or burn down the sugar shack.

It was nice having all the guys back together again working on a common project and poking fun at each other. I think it made us all eager for the proper maple syrup season to begin.

For those who don’t know why we’d be spending so many man-hours putting bricks into our steel arch, it’s because the special fire bricks insulate the outer parts of the rig so that the heat is mostly directed upward, where the maple syrup pans sit, transfering more energy to boiling the sap. Otherwise, the rig would act as a big radiator, using up a lot of that woodfired heat on warming up the sugar shack. Also, the firebrick protects the metal from the most seering of the heat, which prolongs its life.

Here is Robert wacking away at one of the bricks we removed before transporting the used arch. He’s removing the old mortar so they’ll fit nicely when put back in the new setup. You’re supposed to wear goggles when you do this.

Masons will cringe at what I’m about to say. The smoother and neater you put firebrick into an arch, the less turbulence is created in the air as it moves from the firebox, along the underside of the pans and then up the chimney, called a stack. Turbulence is good in this case. It allows more of the flammable gases to burn up and shed their potential heat nearer the maple sugar in the pans above. So here’s a look at the fine job we did “mudding” the bricks up to get some nice friction turbulence running along the sides and bottom. Will it make a difference one way or the other? Almost definitely not, but everything with sugaring has to be accompanied by a theory.

The part accompanied by most theories, though, is the baffles placed under maple syrup pans in order to ensure that the hot gases flow up into the pans corrugations – called flues – before being expelled out the stack. You can see from the picture below that Robert is messing with the first baffle, which is almost all bricked up, with the second one behind it still in metal. The pans sit on top of the side rails, so you can see that these baffles really force the flowing air up into the pan, and into the flue slots.

When boiling, the most vigorous maple sap bubbling action will be where these baffles come up. In this Grimm Lightnening model, the baffles are placed just about where the (cold) sap intake pipe comes into the pan, as well as the place were that sap gets expelled out of that pipe into the pan. I suspect that’s deliberate. Some people put Vermiculite or some other non-moisture-sponging and heat-resistent substance in a layer between the baffles to force the air into the flues the whole length of the pan. We’ll see how our draft is doing once we start boiling to see if we have room to play with such constrictions.

If we find we need more draft to be able to fiddle with such optimizations, we might add more stack height, which draws more air, or start improvising a blower system to introduce high-pressure air into the firebox. Given our natures, the blower is highly likely. Blowers reputedly increase performance by about 15 percent, both in terms of time saved and recovered energy release. The downside: most are very loud. Last year we introduced a cobbled-together blower for the little arch. We used a very quite Vornado fan and some clever ducting. It worked pretty well for the arch, but would be pretty outclassed by the size of this bigger one.

I knew I’d be upgrading to a larger used rig when we were sitting around a boil in the middle of last season. It was me, the two Roberts and John wondering why our new tricks (a homemade pre-heater, an improvised forced draft unit and a few other things, like dry wood) weren’t bringing our number of gallons boiled per hour much higher than it was the year before. We went from about 12 gallon an hour to just shy of 20 gallons an hour. When you have 800 taps, that’s not a lot of gallons, even with the ancient reverse osmosis machine we’d located and cobbled into some sort of working order. If each tap pushed out a gallon of sap in a day – a typical decent run day – we would be boiling at least 10 hours. Add a couple slow hours when starting up in the afternoon and some cleanup time at the end, and you might find yourself seeing the change of light toward dawn before slogging home.

So, sitting there during the boil with the other boys, I took the cordless phone and dialed up Leader Evaporator, finding their number on the back of a catalog. I spoke to a tired-sounding sales guy who proceeded to tell me that a 3×8 air-tight, wood fired arch with a new suit of their best pans would get to something close to $24,000. I put my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered the number to the guys. They immediately set to arguing about which piece of information I’d managed to screw up in relating our requirements to the sales rep. I told the fellow I’d stop wasting his time and went back to the boil and to the argument.

From that day on, we knew we’d be looking for an old-time rig that we could rescue. While the year before I’d seen plenty of wood fired evaporators in the classifieds section, suddenly they’d gone missing. With #2 fuel oil passing the $4 mark, people were sidelining oil rigs and snapping up the units coming on the market that used wood. That and the prices of stainless steel might explain a lot why Leader was demanding a starting year’s salary for an evaporator.

This past summer I found myself out in Enfield helping a friend of a friend look at the sugaring equipment that came with a house and garage he’d bought. He had no intent to sugar, but figured he’d ask me what the stuff was worth. It was a 3×10 wood fired Grimm from 1994. Pretty good condition. Raised flues, stainless, although the sugar pan looked like it had gone through some abuse. It came with steam hoods and all the stack pieces someone could possibly use. I’d made a list of prices for him, that I promptly forgot until a few months later, when my search for a used 3×8 unit proved fruitless.

This morning we picked up that unit, after taking a piece of the west wall of the sugarhouse off so that we could fit the new unit inside. After a century of disuse, this old chicken shack is about to burst its seams with both bulky equipment and the buzz of industry. I owe a big one to the Roberts, John and Mike for wasting a Saturday helping me get this monster over state lines. The picture above is of the trailer that had the 600 gallon feed tank and the evaporator behind it, with the back end just poking over the hitch. The rig filled that, the inside of the truck, and two additional pickups.

For those who’ve never done it, moving an evaporator involves knocking out the fire bricks one by one, transporting them, and then lifting the unit onto whatever is going to transport it. In general, it takes about three times as long you think it will.

The picture below shows the big rig in our shack, with Mike bringing in some bricks from the truck. Later, when we put the pans and hoods on the arch, the whole mass of metal reached just five inches below those cross beams on the ceiling. I still have to brick the arch in, but that’ll wait till worse weather this winter, and in the meantime, we’ll try to get the woods work done before the snow builds too high to work the line.